Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @11:49AM
from the i-wanna-live-in-a-dome dept.

Julie188 writes "After more than three decades of service to researchers and staff stationed at the bottom of the world, the dome at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was deconstructed this austral summer. Designed and constructed by the Seabees — the construction battalions of the US Navy — in the early 1970s, the dome's geodesic design provided a unique solution to the challenges posed to engineers trying to build structures at the South Pole. The dome is being returned to southern California where it will be held in storage. It could possibly be trotted out as an exhibit in a new US Navy Seabees museum."

Great, how do they know that in the past 28 years The Thing hasn't
managed to figure out how to assimilate non-living matter and is now the
dome? Just sitting there, waiting in the cold.I say we take off and nuke
the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Crap! I thought it was "travel in pears"... I have been avoiding the produce section of the store for no reason... though they still might be hiding in the live plant and fresh flowers area.... hmmm...

Actually, for a backup system, LORAN-C was cheap. Estimated price to operate it for a decade was like $22 million. In the government of "a trillion here, a trillion there", $22 million is pocket change.

Hey, this administration dismantled LORAN-C, the backup system in case of GPS satellite spoofing or jamming.....

President Obama is influential, but he isn't capable of time travel. President Bush scheduled the dismantling, President Obama continued that recommendation. Both the Coast Guard and the DHS said they didn't need LORAN-C, so why maintain it? It smells like pork.

This dismantling was already scheduled by the previous administration, according to the FA [popularmechanics.com].

The Department of Homeland Security last year started a painful upgrade to LORAN-C, adding modern electronics and solid-state transmitters, despite the fact that in 2008 President George W. Bush signed a law that scheduled the system's dissolution.

The Homeland Security Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2010 allowed for termination of the LORAN-C signal on January 4, 2010, after certification from the Commandant of the Coast Guard that it was not needed for maritime navigation and from the Secretary of DHS that it is not needed as a backup for GPS.

Then both the Bush and Obama administrations are guilty of stupidity on this one. Loran was relatively cheap, and what do you do if ASAT's from a hostile power start taking out GPS satellites? You're basically back to pre-1940's navigation methods. Hope your pilots are up on their starlight navigation skills. Hope your mariners haven't tossed their sextants.

Aircraft are slowly becoming 100% dependent on GPS (unless they're large enough to have inertial navigation systems on board). The FAA has been slowly but surely decommissioning ground-based navigation transmitters of other types. (Example, the airport down the road just decommissioned its ILS Middle Marker beacon, and it's not coming back. The information it provided pilots of older aircraft without Instrument-rated GPS on board, is now gone

They still haven't identified the backup for GPS, though. The best reason to do away with it that I can think of, though, is that it was designed for civilian use and yet practically no civilians use it. Consequently almost nobody has a receiver.

Although the Federal Register notice also indicates that a decision has not been made on the need for a GPS backup, the announcement apparently brings to a close a seemingly interminable process of preserving and upgrading the terrestrial radionavigation system to provide an enhanced Loran (eLoran) capability that could serve as a multimodal backup to failures or interference to the Global Positioning System.

That process spanned several years, two administrations, and the expenditure of $160 million over the last 10 years to partially modernize a network of Loran stations that now will be phased out. It also flies in the face of an independent assessment team’s unanimous recommendation to establish eLoran as a GPS backup, as well as the efforts of navigation counterparts in other nations, notably the United Kingdom, to implement eLoran.

They have a large, new building and don't need this one. It's too small and requires a lot of maintenance. The international treaty governing Antarctica requires that unused buildings be removed and the site returned to as close to the original state as possible. No danger of it turning into a penguin slum this far from the coast, but if the Shoggoths move in, it will really mess up the neighborhood.

The dome could no longer accommodate the demands of research activities taking place there, however, and each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on. Blowing snow that collected on top of it had to be removed and hauled away, burning up precious fuel and crew time during the short austral summer. The international treaty that governs human activities in Antarctica requires that buildings and equipment no longer in use be removed and the site remediated whenever possible, necessitating the dome's deconstruction and removal.

I can understand the last two points (snow covering it, and no littering in Antarctica), but did the structure stay there for 30 years and only now the sinking into the snow becomes a problem? Given the panels are so light, they could have dis- and reassembled them when needed. Maybe made up to soften the accountants sharp pencil of "too expensive!"

Snow covering it is sinking into the snow. Same effect. Snow covers it each year but never melts. The next year, more snow covers it.

Meanwhile, the entire glacier is slowly squirting out at all sides towards the sea. The net effect is a glacier that's not necessarily getting any thicker, but items sitting on top of it effectively "sink" in the additional snowfall as any given layer moves down and out to the sea.

The new station can be jacked up on hydraulics up to two stories "higher" than its current po

To be more accurate, though, underground (well, under-ice) parking is convenient next door in the Logistics and Maintenance Arches, it's just that it's a pain going up and down all those stairs to get from the subsurface arch to the elevated station.

The safety devices on the elevator don't work in those temperatures, so it can be used for supplies but not for people.

"The dome could no longer accommodate the demands of research activities taking place there, however, and each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on. Blowing snow that collected on top of it had to be removed and hauled away, burning up precious fuel and crew time during the short austral summer. The international treaty that governs human activities in Antarctica requires that buildings and equipment no longer in use be removed and the site remediated whenever possible, necessitating the dome's deconstruction and removal."

[...] each year the structure sunk deeper into the ice it was built on.

Everyone said I was daft to build a dome on an ice sheet, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built another. That sank into the ice. So I dismantled that one and built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the ice. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest dome in all of Antarctica!

I'm one of the 47 down here for the 2010 Winter season, the crew is missing the Dome. It was an icon in Antarctica, and this place feels like it's missing something without it. Someone pointed earlier to Spindler's website http://www.southpolesation.com/ [southpolestation.com] where there is much more on the deconstruction from the unofficial South Pole historian.
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